Day 14: Gauss can one-theorem numbers

by Danielle Navarro, 10 May 2018

I did not sleep well last night, and I am still getting over some mysterious illness. So this is a short post. The gaussfacts package prints out very true facts about Carl Friedrich Gauss, sourced from the canonical source gaussfacts.com. Unlike Gauss, I need packages to compute things:

library(gaussfacts)
library(tidyverse)
library(stopwords)

Here are 10 extreme truths about greatest mathematician since antiquity.

gaussfact(1:10)

## Gauss didn’t discover the normal distribution, nature conformed to
## his will.
## Gauss can trisect an angle with a straightedge and compass.
## Gauss can get to the other side of a Möbius strip.
## “Uncountably Infinite” was a phrase coined to explain the
## intelligence of Gauss.
## There are no Fermat Primes greater than 65,537 because Gauss saw
## that Fermat was on to something, and well…he put an end to that.
## For Gauss, arithmetic is consistent AND complete.
## It only takes Gauss 4 minutes to sing “Aleph-Null Bottles of Beer
## on the Wall”.
## When Gauss tells you that he’s lying, he’s telling the truth.
## Gauss once played himself in a zero-sum game and won $50.
## Gauss did not prove theorems, he simply stared at them until they
## yielded their solutions.

These truths are dangerous. The stories are wrapped in a data frame wrapped in an environment that is not exported from the namespace. No operator less powerful than ::: can recover the stories. No variable can contain them, they can only be piped. A small slice of the truth can be discovered by finding the most frequent words among all the known the Gauss facts: